Beauty & the Big Indian Kitchen
In India, food is not only loved, cooked and eaten, but also worn. The deep links between the kitchen and the Indian body also translates into language. Nikita Biswal explores the rich and complex history of food as beauty, in the Indian context.
My mother leaves a small bowl of milk unboiled in the refrigerator — a beauty secret she inherited from her great-grandmother. Using raw milk for glowing skin is a family speciality, a quick rinse leaves her face soft against the dust and pollution of the city. The routine is a mundane part of her mornings. On days when I feel like indulging in some self-care, I too reach for the bowl of cold, natural cleanser in the fridge. The cultural trust in milk, abundantly used in Indian cooking, makes it an important ingredient in beauty regimes. Mixed with a spot of turmeric from the spice-box, it is a household classic across the country. A friend once told me that the secret behind her grandmother’s enviable soft skin was cream — plucked from the sides of the saucepan, after boiling the family’s supply of milk.
There is a long tradition of food migrating from the kitchen to become part of self-care regimens, in Indian families. In India, food is not only loved, cooked and eaten, but also worn.
The trust in homegrown ingredients is key to these recipes and remedies. Preserved and shared across generations, they become material heirlooms in the family; part-and-parcel of the private food cultures of homes.
Every Sunday morning, my next-door neighbour breaks two eggs for an omelette, and a third for a hair mask she will luxuriate in, in her small bathroom. The Indian household shares an intimate relationship with food that goes beyond cooking and eating. The distinction between what goes inside and what goes outside the body is inverted in these traditions. Raw, organic and fresh ingredients are repurposed, often alongside preparations for meals, to create homemade face and hair packs. Neem and fenugreek seeds are beaten to a paste in the same mortar and pestle used to grind masalas. Tomatoes, potatoes and onions are readily selected from the vegetable basket and mashed to a pulp to make face packs. A slice of lemon is squeezed over like garnish — the ‘brightening’ fix for a tan.
As with food, these recipes are harvested and informed by geographies. Local produce, a cultural commodity, organises beauty routines — in the north, home to the national dairy, milk, in Bengal, coconuts and in Rajasthan, almonds brought in by traders, are used for the skin. While the tradition is deeply rooted in principles of Ayurveda, it has acquired an aroma of romance in the kitchen where beauty is a recipe to be ‘cooked.’ The idea of beauty is physically located in kitchen cabinets, ingredients and utensils, expanding its vocabulary to include the vast universe of cooking.
The Indian kitchen is an extension of the self; women build elaborate relationships with, and around, food. This is a space for knowledge — its birth, sharing and adaptation, teaching and undeniably, storytelling. Above all else, the Indian kitchen is a space for imagination. Ideas of beauty are cultivated in the family, from mother to daughter, replicating the recipes and practices of cooking. Traditionally relegated to the kitchen, women appropriated ingredients used in cooking for their own bodies, to reincarnate a subordinated relationship to food. This gendered practice enables women to reclaim their bodies and place the idea of beauty in self-love and nourishment.
Taking ownership of the body comes from a highly personal connection to food, as seen all over the subcontinent. Everything in the Indian kitchen evokes a strong sense of belonging. Ingredients commonly used in traditional recipes are reincorporated into regional beauty practices. In rice-growing areas of the east, water drained from cooked rice is used as a cure for hair fall. Cuddapah almonds, that give Indian sweets like kheer and payasam a nutty flavour in the South, are applied as a paste for clear skin. In many households in the north, ghee, and in the south, coconut oil, is the answer to everything. Languorous afternoons are spent oiling the hair with homemade blends of coconut oil, almond oil, olive oil, amla — Indian gooseberry — oil or castor oil.
The act itself holds tremendous value. As women across generations come together, taking time to unwind, the shared solitude generates personal rituals that go beyond the individual, and become pivotal in defining relationships to food, to family and to the local geographies of the Indian kitchen — a dynamic and idiosyncratic space. Homemade beauty goes a long way in shaping identities – these recipes are memorised and carried over long distances like nostalgic possessions. Though acquired within regional cultures, they interact in college hostels, weddings and family parties. Community recipes thus travel from one part of the country to another — you will find women in Bihar using buttermilk for hair, just like women in Gujarat. These are everlasting things.
Beauty becomes tactile in this process, textured with fragrances and colour. The nitty-gritty work of kneading ingredients by hand, whisking the staple gram flour with milk and honey with one’s fingers, gives the method an elaborate intimacy. These ingredients are used in concoctions, mixed with other loved things from the kitchen. Regular yellow gram is combined with eggs, curd, lemon juice and oils of choice, for hair, or a spoonful of homemade ghee for the skin. Many cook beauty recipes from scratch, pressing sandalwood paste by hand or curing their own curd from milk.
I have a small batch of aloe vera on my terrace garden that my mother occasionally peels for making aloe gel. These kitchen gardens extend the relationship between food and skin to the peripheries of kitchen windows and balconies.
Beauty is domesticated into a quick and easy home science available at a hand’s reach or inside one’s refrigerator. In the process, one develops an intuitive understanding of the nutritional qualities of food. Beauty is intricately tied to seasons; one grows up using papaya face masks in the summer, or strawberry exfoliators in winter. Everything, from cucumbers to kiwi, contains a secret recipe for good and glowing skin. Orange peels from breakfast are frequently recycled as face scrubs, transforming the role of leftovers. These garden solutions are also sourced locally. Dried orange peel is mixed with black onion seeds and white mustard to make body scrubs in arid areas of Rajasthan. In Goa, kokam, a popular sour fruit, is pressed for butter and used on the skin. Along the coast, particularly in Tamil Nadu, both bark and leaves of banana trees provide handy hair treatments. Fruits, vegetables and seeds become multipurpose additions to the household beauty kit; traditions that bring one closer to the slow, pastoral calendar of food in the country’s rural contours.
The deep links between the world of the kitchen and the Indian body directly translates in language. Soft skin is described as creamy, and often compared to malai or butter. Food is inevitably attached to the radiance and colour of skin and hair. My sister believes the trick to luscious coffee-brown hair colour is simply that — coffee powder!
The incorporeal place of food in beauty creates particular attachments to ingredients, utensils and processes; a relationship preserved in the folds of life through the everyday geopolitics of the Indian kitchen.
Nikita Biswal is a final year student of literature at King’s College London. She is currently writing about the city and food memories. You can find her here.
Banner image credit: Sprig & Vine
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